Cascade Beer Drinkers Defeat Grocery Shrink Ray

By Ben PopkenFebruary 24, 2009

When Fosters-owned Cascade beer (different from regular Fosters in that it tastes decent) switched to 330ml from 375ml while charging the same price, consumers let their discontent be known in a highly visible fashion: they stopped buying it. Fosters reported a 33% drop in sales and some retailers reported up to a 50% drop. In response to the steep drop-off, Fosters is going back to 375ml, the standard size for canned beers in Australia.

@failurate: I won’t try to defend the bottles, but at least they accept their stunted position in life. It’s just a shame when I pour a can of the black into a Guinness Pint glass and it doesn’t fill it all the way.

@drb023: We get it here in LA too. Not so easy to find but so worth it. It tastes immeasuably better with sugar. I think the glass bottle helps too. I’ll try Pepsi with real sugar though – I prefer Coke but with real sugar, maybe I’ll prefer Pepsi to US Coke. I salute Pepsi for not continuing down the cheap (high-fructose corn syrup) road.

@Patrick Henry: We went searching through the soda section at the grocery last week hoping they had already released it. I can’t remember the last time I went looking for some product based on learning about it. I am not even a huge Pepsi fan but I want to give it a try. I hope Coke gets a clue soon.

@Patrick Henry: The thing is, as it stands, sugar cola is immensely more expensive to produce, and since they are introducing it as a “novelty” product – it will probably be twice the price of regular soda – and they’ve already reduced 12 packs to 8 packs.

Did they raise the price, and were people ok with that? Presumably they shrunk the cans to maintain price point, but if their customers backlashed, then that would require raising prices, right? In abstract, I prefer incremental price hikes to shrinking contents, particularly when manufacturers try to hide it by selling me more air, but I don’t know how the rest of the world would react to a higher price.

“Foster’s never intended to rip off its customers or make them unhappy by giving them less beer for the same money, [a spokeswoman] said.”

So, what…they gave their customers less beer for the same money by accident? Did vandals sneak in to the bottling factory in the middle of the night and retool the production line and redesign all the labeling in secret?

I was going to make some crack about Australian companies being lying liars just like American companies, but then I realized that American companies at least come up with more plausible sounding bullshit. Come on, Australia, step it up here.

Foster’s is almost certainly not Australian anymore. I don’t know a single other Aussie who drinks that crap.

The article is referring to the Foster’s owned Cascade brewery, who do actually produce decent beer. It was total crap that they did this, but every Aussie brewer is reducing size and/or reducing the alcohol content. Lame.

@vision4bg: “I don’t know a single other Aussie who drinks that crap.”

Have you not noticed that lots of “export” beers are not actually drunk in their home countries? I saw some “American” beers sold in Europe that I’d never HEARD of (and I like my beer), being advertised as “America’s favorite beer!” So when they say “Foster’s: Australian for beer” in the ads, I assume they mean, “Hey, I think you’ll buy this if you think Aussies drink it!”

@Coles_Law: Whether BuddyHinton knew it or not, he was actually pointing out a neat brain trick. Fluent speakers/readers of English (I’m not sure if this works in other launguages) look at the overall shape of a word when they read it, so for many words, you can rearrange the middle letters as long as you keep the first and last the same. For example, Buddy typed “glad” as “gald” and “hear” as “haer.” When you look at them closely, they’re obviously wrong, but read an entire sentence, and it becomes diffciult to notice the diffreence.

@karmaghost: I ran a psych experiment on that phenomenon for my research project. The words have to be in context for them to be as easily deciphered. People were able to understand the jumbled words easier within a sentence (even one made entirely of other jumbled words) than they were able to decipher the jumbled words standing alone. Also, in a long word the jumbled middle letters have to stay in the correct half of the word for the word to be deciphered quickly/easily.

And, it still says “CHUNK light tuna” on the can, but inside, it’s shredded. It looks like somebody already ate it. This is both Chicken of the Sea and StarKist. I don’t know what they are trying to do. Package up the tuna leftovers that fall off the saw?

@Marshfield: I’m boycotting Breyers right now because of the shrink. As a bonus – I wrote Unilever a complaint, they sent me a coupon for a free .375 gallon and 2 dollar off coupons. So I bought 3 more. Last one is in the freezer, then I’m back to making my own.

I don’t regularly buy tuna, so I haven’t noticed yet. Bought like a dozen cans on sale last time, but I’m out now and it’s on my list.

@Marshfield: Yes, you could. What you do is you don’t buy the product as they currently package it and if enough other people do that with you, they either stop selling the product or they package it differently.

@Marshfield: I tell myself that I’m going to buy less ice cream because this shrinking nonsense, but ice cream is my crack. I might at least switch to the ones who aren’t pulling this crap. I’ll look for 2 qt. versions first, and 1.75 qt 2nd. On that note, anyone know if they sell Blue Bell around East Lansing, Michigan? I heard good things, but I haven’t seen it.

@SinDex23: The draught bottles aren’t that size to save money, though, it’s the widget. You can’t really fault them for that if you still want the creamy simulated draught goodness. If you want more, I think the stouts are 12oz, yeah?

All beer should come in 500mL bottles/ cans in my opinion. I don’t understand why US consumers appear to be the only beer drinkers in the world that can’t seem to handle half liter bottles. Better yet bring out the 1L cans. I bought a great bit 1L can of Faxe in Hamburg last spring, and that was amazing.

The standard packaged beer sizes in Australia is: cans (375ml), regular bottles (375ml) and ‘long neck’ bottles (750ml). But who drinks Fosters in Australia anyway? The most popular is VB also made by Foster’s Group

The Wall Street Journal reported a withdrawal of the mighty forces of the Grocery Shrink Ray yesterday:

Heinz is offering consumers larger ketchup bottles that sell at smaller price gaps to private label in the U.S. Meanwhile, Frito-Lay in North America will begin adding 20% more product to take-home bags of its corn-based Tostitos, Fritos, Cheetos and Doritos without increasing the price.

I haven’t bought Breyer’s Ice Cream for 4 years because they led the downsizing of half gallons of ice cream. From 2 quarts to 1.75 and now to the embarrassingly small 1.5 quarts, all the while charging premium prices.

It’s too bad, too, since I loved their vanilla bean ice cream and wouldn’t ever consider buying any other kind of ice cream. They lost me as a customer forever when I discovered other products for half the price that were just as good.